experience between day and night on these streets were those of relative comfort, ease of cir- 50- culation, and visual opportunity: Map of The most convenient time for this promenade is the morning, between 9 AM and noon, Paris, when the crowd is not yet too dense. Later, between 2 and 6 PM, and in the evening gth arron- between 8 and 11 PM, there is such a crowd, especially between the Madeleine and the dissement, boulevard de Sebastopol, that it is no longer possible to examine at one's leisure the from buildings, the stores, etc. Nevertheless you repeat this promenade in the evening, when Michelin hundreds of thousands of gaslamps transform night into day, and you can also see the Atlas, Paris interior of all the beautiful stores, thanks to the brilliant lighting system most have par 135 arrondisse- adopted. ments, Baedeker's geographically precise recommendations give the city a discursive form that follows no. 15, ist the canons of many such tourist aids. It is strictly pavement, architecture, eclairage (lighting), ed., 1989. stores, and cafes. (It is as though the Paris that really mattered would survive a neutron bomb explosion.) The contemporaneous social texture of the city is not part of the account beyond a passing mention of the foule (crowd). This tactful and respectable text summons up a lively spectacle but, in keeping with the tastes and sensitivities of Baedeker's probable readers, con- 136 structs a city whose features do not seem to exist in a historical or social context. Certain Impressionists saw this glamourous quarter of the city through a Baedeker-like now n mythologizing lens. Claude Monet's well-known Boulevard des Capucines of 1873—74 ( i 95